For the first piece on his program at MIT's Kresge Auditorium this Friday evening, Peter Planyavsky chose an interesting work: the Fantasy in B-flat Major by Alexandre Pierre F. Boëly (1785-1858).
Boëly holds an important — and fascinating — place in the history of French music. He has been called “one of those luckless figures in music.”
During much of the 19th century, France was a bit like Italy in that the musical mainstream consisted mostly of opera. Add to that the virulent anti-German sentiment of those times, and you can see why there weren’t many symphonies being written in France (and no important ones, that I can think of, between 1830 and 1886).
Boëly, meanwhile, was an outspoken opponent of this new Romantic music, favoring instead composers like Bach, Couperin, and Frescobaldi. From 1840 to 1851, Boëly played at St. Germain-l’Auxerrois in Paris, where he tirelessly promoted the music of his favorite composers – all of whom were dead, and none of whom were Romantic. After 11 years, St. Germain dismissed Boëly, who spent the rest of his career as a piano teacher in relative obscurity.
But this isn’t the whole story. Boëly had a great influence on future generations of French composers, especially Franck and Saint-Saëns – both of whom did indeed dare to write symphonies.
Meanwhile, as Daniel Roth has pointed out, one reason Widor was never promoted from Provisional Organist to Titular Organist of St. Sulpice in Paris is because the church authorities felt his playing was “too German.” Today we often forget how avant-garde it was for Widor to perform and edit so much Bach, or to compose music in a clearly Beethovenian style (such as the famous Andante Cantabile).
For all of this, the somewhat obscure, somewhat scorned Boëly laid the groundwork.
